Irene Pollach receives 2.5 million grant

Associate Professor Irene Pollach has received a grant of 2,515,026 DKK from the Danish Council for Independent Research - Social Sciences (Det Frie Forskningsråd - Samfund og Erhverv) for the research project entitled 'Discursive Power over Financial News'.

Project descriptionThe quality of financial news has been found to have a significant impact on financial markets. Financial news is the product of a network of interlinked agents, including companies announcing their financial results by means of earnings press releases and news agencies, news media outlets, and financial analysts as contributors to such news. The news industry has seen eroding profits over the past decades, along with increasing competition for timeliness. As a consequence, the news media no longer have the means to research all their stories themselves and may be forced to rely on press releases.

This project seeks to answer the following question: Do news agencies, news outlets and financial analysts exercise their power over financial-news content by filtering out any self-serving biases in corporate press releases or do they reproduce such biases, thus granting companies the power to shape the news about themselves?